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Friday, February 20, 2015

Countering Violent Extremism the Right Way, by Michael Rubin

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the offices of French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo and
the subsequent attack by Islamist extremists on a kosher market,
President Barack Obama invited political and religious leaders to a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.
The whole summit is a bit amorphous and unfortunately seems to be the
latest example of foreign policy by photo-op rather than substance.

Crippling the U.S. effort is an unwillingness to address
the theological component: violent interpretations of Islam. I have
spent the last several days in Morocco, witness to the academic and
diplomatic effort to counter extremism which was a major subject of
discussion at the Marrakech Security Forum, and then in Rabat, where I
was able to sit in on workshops in which Moroccan graduates of religious
studies programs and peer leaders addressed strategies to identify and
counter radicalism among their peers.
I have previously addressed some aspects of Morocco’s strategy to promote religious moderation, here. Morocco has pioneered the Mourchidat
program, in which both men and women together study the same religious
curriculum, but combine it with instruction in psychology, sociology,
and history so that they can discuss and explain religion to ordinary
people so that extremists do not have a blank slate upon which they can
declare their interpretation of Islam to be the correct one.
In
addition, the Moroccans have set up networks to reach across society in
order to nip radicalization in the bud, and provide alternatives. Think a
religious equivalent of Boys and Girls Clubs,
one in which young people undertake activities that provide
alternatives to the Islamist vision. Other groups reach out via
children’s books, cartoons, and interactive websites, some for children,
and others for serious discussion and debate about religion and
radicalism. See, for example, www.chababe.ma, whose offices I visited today.
Many
Western diplomats and experts understand that change will have to come
from within. Moroccan religious leaders recognize there is no single
summit or call for international attention which can moderate growing
extremism within Islam. Rather, it is a decades-long struggle that
requires building a group of religious scholars that have credibility to
push back upon those Saudi- and Qatar-funded and Muslim
Brotherhood-oriented scholars inclined either to politicize Islam or to
push more intolerant lines.
It also means not dismissing
moderation in places such as Morocco as simply peripheral to the world
of Islam. Today, the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina lay in
Saudi Arabia, but that is only because Ibn Saud in 1925 conquered the
previous Kingdom of Hejaz. The reality is that Nejd, from where the
Saudis came, was long obscure and marginal to Islamic history, and that
Saudi Arabia itself and the brand of Islam which it (and Qatar) promotes
was not relevant until they used oil wealth to promote it. Morocco and
Moroccan religious scholars have traditionally been far more influential
throughout Africa and during both the Umayyad and Fatimid eras, as well
as under the Almoravids.
In many ways, the Islam practiced in and increasingly promoted by
Morocco is far more authentic than the Wahhabism espoused by Saudi
Arabia.
Nor should Western officials dismiss voices of moderation
simply because calls for moderation against extremism occur alongside
political agendas. Here, the case of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi is instructive. In late December, Sisi made an extraordinary speech
at Al-Azhar University calling upon theologians to revolutionize and
modernize religion. His speech was largely ignored in the United States
and the West, but it reverberated across the Maghreb and the Middle
East. American diplomats seem more intent on antagonizing and isolating
Sisi or dismissing his call to revolutionize Islam as a political ploy
to further undercut the Muslim Brotherhood. Even if that were the case,
however, what’s wrong with that? Radical Islamism and the theology
preached by the Muslim Brotherhood are inherently political. The only
difference between Sisi and the Muslim Brotherhood is that Sisi seeks to
promote a vision of religion which embraces tolerance and enables
greater individual liberty, while the Brotherhood seeks to constrain
interpretations and de-legitimize those who seek interpretations of
Islam which conform with individual liberty and broader religious
tolerance.
In sum, there’s no shortage in the Middle East of
efforts to counter violent extremism. Those in the region who seek to
counter violent extremism don’t tie their hands with political
correctness: They recognize that the problem lies within interpretations
of Islam, and simply seek to counter those interpretations with better
ones. Denying the legitimacy of the religious basis for extremism,
however, is counterproductive. It is also arrogant, as the people who
least have credibility to define what Islam is or is not are those like
President Obama whose legitimacy is entirely political and not based in
theology.
So what should the West do? We must embrace those like
the Moroccan and Egyptian governments which actively seek to promote
moderation. Moroccan King Mohammed VI and Sisi—and the religious
scholars who work alongside them—have much greater standing to lead the
drive than a White House intent on a photo-op or an easy answer. We must
not stand in the way of those voices who acknowledge the need for contemporary interpretations that focus on the present and future rather than the past.
And
we must not fall into the trap of assuming compromise means finding the
lowest common denominator. Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups like
the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society
of North America (ISNA) might be the loudest in the United States
because their financiers provide the resources to enable them to be, but
that does not mean anyone should treat them as sincere in the effort to
counter radicalization; rather, we should recognize that their main
goal is to obfuscate the theological roots of radicalism and undercut
the sincere efforts of moderates across the Middle East and elsewhere to
promote moderation, modernity, and tolerance within Islam.